A stranger has no love-talk, but she was the one who unknowingly found the way to connect him with home, with the possibility of home. It was a casual remark following on a question about how he was passing the time, which he could not answer because a warder woke and intervened, saying talk of prison matters was not allowed.
— Well, I suppose you find sermons in stones. — A bit breathless at having managed at least to hand on some of the information she had been given by others, she jerked her head shyly at the confines of the walls.
He grinned to receive this, another kind of message, she was almost certainly not aware of; elated to be able to recognize it. — And good in your kindness in coming to see me.—
The young woman was not graceful or well dressed — not in the way he liked, in a woman, that gave a woman like his wife class and breeding, even in the ghetto. But what does that matter. Sonny had had to change his mind about so many things, as his life changed, as the very meaning of his ridiculous name changed — first a hangover from sentimental parents, then a nickname to reassure the crowds at rallies that he was one of them, then an addendum to his full names in a prison dossier: 'also known as "Sonny" '. A common criminal with aliases.
Hannah. She introduced herself like that at once; a prison visiting room is no place for formalities. It was only later, when he met her outside prison, that he saw how she had been the first time she came to visit. Head and shoulders, the portrait was, that he kept with him everywhere, in his mind, as a photograph is carried between identity documents in a breast pocket. It must have been a cold June day outside — but prison always gave the impression of cold, anyway, swept clean, bare, with only hairy floating filaments in a cone of light, alive; from the breasts up, as she appeared behind glass above the wooden barrier, she had prepared herself with layers of garments, loose-sleeved knitted things over some sort of canvas waistcoat and several T-shirts whose clashing colours overlapped at the neckline. She had eased a striped scarf and freed her broad, matt-white neck in a gush of warmth (a retouch of the picture that came from subsequent experience of her presence without the separation of glass and wood). Her lips were quilted by the dry cold and paler than a soft pink face whose colour changed with a kind of patchy radiance as she steered double-talk past the warders. A big face whose bone structure was not evident. Two small cold-reddened pads of earlobes appearing and disappearing under rough-cut curly hair. Blonde. Of course, with that skin colouring. Very blonde. But not consciously so (as so many women with that attribute tend to be); her attention on more important things. He could not reconstruct how she had looked full-length, walking away from him after a warder. The lightly freckled calves that remained sturdy right down to the ankle, bringing her towards him, were not any fixed image, but recurring through the pattern of their meetings, moving; always now, not then.
She came to the trial. It was her professional duty. She was often there; when he and the others with whom he was charged filed up from the cell beneath the court and turned smiling to look for relatives and friends in the gallery, she lifted a hand in reliable greeting. Aila could come only occasionally, she was receptionist to an Indian doctor at his city rooms in the lower end of town, and on Saturdays, when he did not consult there, the court did not sit. The doctor was generous in offering her time off, but Aila was conscientious, it was an article of faith between Sonny and her, part of her loyalty and support for him, in prison, that they would not let the State destroy the discipline of their daily life. When she could come she brought him jackets and trousers fresh from the dry-cleaner — as no longer a detainee but an accused on trial without bail he was allowed such humanizing privileges, and it was a tactic, displaying high morale to the judge, to confront him day after day with alleged revolutionaries looking like businessmen. Aila knew Hannah Plowman, who was monitoring the trial — the young woman had kindly come to the house once, while Sonny was still a detainee, to offer her organization's help — but they did not sit together in the visitors' gallery; the young woman had her colleagues, people from the churches, representatives from foreign embassies, a colloquy exchanging mouth-to-ear observations and analyses of how the Defence's case was going. Aila sat among the other wives, mothers, fathers of the accused, big peasant women in crocheted hats who rested deformed feet out of shoes worn lopsided, young pregnant women with defiant profiles under beaded lovelocks, grey-woolled old men wearing Church of Zion badges. Sonny would pick her out at once, there in one of her white blouses with the bow looped through her string of seed pearls, the plastic folder from the dry-cleaner neatly arranged across her lap so as not to crease his clothes.
At the tea-break, when the court had risen for the judge to retire, the colloquy of observers surged forward sociably along with the relatives. Couples embraced across the barrier of the witness box but it was not Aila's and Sonny's way to kiss on the mouth in public, their intimacy always had been too private for exposure. She leaned on the barrier and he held her hands folded together in his; and then she released herself, her eyes so brimming with dark, so shining and solemn, and handed over the dry-cleaner's bag with explanations of stains that couldn't be removed, as if this were the most important exchange between them. And they talked of family matters, although there was no restriction except political discretion on what they might say softly to one another, for these few minutes, here. Every other moment they were interrupted by his putting an arm out behind her to shake hands with a fellow prisoner's relative, or he would have to turn away — gripping her wrist or upper arm, through the cloth, to keep the precious contact with her hidden self — to talk to one of the observers about some point they ought to make when seeking support for the Defence among influential people abroad. Sonny had to share out the brief interval of the judge's tea-break like this because he had become spokesman for his fellow accused: the studious ex-schoolteacher had a way with words.
Will came, and Baby, when the trial continued through the school holidays, and Will, so tall already, eyebrows beginning to grow together in a crossbow, just like his own, kissed and hugged him, laughed, didn't want to let go. But Baby cried, and an extraordinary distress came over Sonny. There in the babbling company of the tea-break, the court where police stood at every exit deceptively sluggish as dogs who will attack at the first move, he was overcome by what he had done, got himself into this prisoner's dock, going to be shut away in a cell at the end of the day's hearing; suddenly possessed of an urge — jump the barrier, take this poor girl-child of his and break out. Aila was at work; the children had been brought to court by one of the lawyers. The young woman who was monitoring the trial, who had been once to the family house, appeared at the girl's side and comforted her, smiled away Baby's embarrassment; and Sonny's panic died down without anyone noticing his moment of weakness, more shameful than the natural emotion of a daughter whose struggle was only with adolescence.